The poverty of the stimulus is the claim, within linguistics, that children are not exposed to rich enough linguistic data in their environment to acquire every feature of their language without some innate, language-specific cognitive biases to draw on. The argument is used to support the theory of universal grammar, the idea that certain aspects of a person's competence in language are innate rather than learned purely from exposure. Noam Chomsky coined the term in 1980, and the argument remains debated among linguists, with critics proposing alternative models suggesting that acquiring a language from the available input may be less difficult than poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments assume.
Facts
Core ClaimThe poverty of the stimulus is the claim that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language without innate language-specific cognitive biases, used as evidence for universal grammar. 1 FAQs
Why do nativists say the language children hear is not enough to learn from?
Children hear only positive evidence and imperfect, uneven input, which nativists take as support for an innate universal grammar, a conclusion that remains debated.
Researchers who frame the argument, such as Pullum and Scholz, point to several ways the input falls short. Children are exposed only to positive evidence, so they receive no explicit correction or instruction about what is not possible in their language. The input is also degenerate in scope, meaning it does not show the full extent of any grammatical rule, and degenerate in quality, because it includes speech errors, utterances by nonnative speakers and false starts. The data also differs from one child to the next. From a nativist point of view, this insufficiency leads to the conclusion that humans are born with a universal grammar. That conclusion remains controversial, and critics such as Fiona Cowie argue that the argument fails on both empirical and conceptual grounds.
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Source Poverty of the stimulus (Wikipedia)
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1. Poverty of the stimulus (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundationlead paragraph
the poverty of the stimulus is the claim that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language without innate language-specific cognitive biases.
lead paragraph, coinage sentence
The term "poverty of the stimulus" was coined by Noam Chomsky in Rules and Representations, 1980.
Developed By: Noam Chomsky, Lead
The term "poverty of the stimulus" was coined by Noam Chomsky in Rules and Representations, 1980.
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